The Center for the Study of Tobacco Products (CSTP) brings together a multidisciplinary group of faculty and staff from VCU, American University of Beirut, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and the University of Southern California, as well as several other U.S. and international universities and organizations to focus on an issue of immediate concern to public health — the regulation of tobacco products.

The CSTP seeks to provide the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with hypothesis-driven data regarding advanced generation ECIGs and test predictions about some potential regulations now, while developing a model that can be used to shape, refine and predict the effects of many potential regulatory actions in the future. Overall, CSTP’s integrative theme of impact analysis draws on our expertise in tobacco product toxicity, user behavior, abuse liability and prospective cohort survey methods to provide FDA tools that can be used to guide regulation development so that, by the time a regulation goes into effect, methods predictive of population-level phenomena have tested it, refined it and generated data that show its health-promoting effects are maximized and unintended consequences are minimized.

This research was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U54DA036105 and the Center for Tobacco Products of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the NIH or the FDA.